


A Rabbit Speaks of Rivers

by thecoldlightofday



Category: Zootopia (2016)
Genre: AU, F/M
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2016-03-15
Updated: 2016-03-14
Packaged: 2018-05-26 20:13:21
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,093
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6254287
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/thecoldlightofday/pseuds/thecoldlightofday
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>AU of canon. Nick's a single father turned pawpsicle hustler. Judy's a meter maid whose dreams of grandeur get her fired.</p>
            </blockquote>





	A Rabbit Speaks of Rivers

When Judy sees the fox—Nick—the kind and loving father, collecting popsicle residue in a jug while the treat she bought with her last twenty dollars melts in the blazing sun, anger prickles the fur from the tips of her ears to her toenails. She follows him. She has to. She watches him buckle his son into a car seat and drive off in a van that kick starts like a firecracker. She makes sure to stay one car over and three behind.

At first she’s not sure what’s happening, but his son toddles around on wobbly legs, placing sticks into the freshly fallen snow. He falls once, flat onto his bottom, and his lips wibble and Judy has spent enough time watching her little brothers and sisters to know that he’s going to cry.

Nick picks his son up under his armpits and spins him. He tucks him to his chest and they fall together and the impact of Nick’s body sends up a whuff of snow that flutters down onto them softly. The baby, no longer a second away from a meltdown, squeals.

Then Nick proceeds to pour the juice into his own pawprints, and when he holds up the first of the batch—bright red and the perfect imprint of his paw—he gives it to his son, who devours it voraciously and sucks on the red stained stick.

Judy’s burning, hotter than the summer sun cooking the pavement, as she watches Nick set up shop downtown, within eyeshot of an investment banking firm. He’s profiting off her charity, her act of kindness, pedaling pawpsicles and “lumber.” Even after she defended him, after she tried to be a role model for his son.

“You lied to me,” she says when she confronts him, and really, it’s the worst she can accuse. He _lied_ to her, an officer of the law, a fellow mammal and Good Samaritan.

“It’s called a hustle, sweetheart,” Nick says, nonchalant. He hoists his son higher on his hip. The baby sucks quietly on his pacifier, blinking at her with his big, round eyes. His little muzzle twitches in amusement.

He calls it a hustle. She calls it criminal.

Only—he’s not a criminal. Not in any way that she can pinpoint. He’s a criminal, morally speaking, but legally he’s too clean to touch.

“You’re a cute meter maid though, really,” he says, saluting her goodbye while his son starts to nod off against his shoulder. “Keep saving the city one parking violation at a time!”  


She watches him disappear around the corner, cement drying on her feet like brittle shoes.

-

It’s hot again. The whole city is baking like an asphalt oven, but Judy’s too excited to notice. Too excited to care. She has a case; she has a lead. And the fox she met yesterday is central to all of it. It’s destiny, it has to be. This fox is the answer to all her prayers. He’ll give up the information, she’ll find the missing mammals, and she’ll never have to write another ticket again.

Only, she confronts him, and he doesn’t spill. He laughs at her. He talks to her like she’s scum of the earth. He lords his foresight over her, his shifty prowess. He’s a _professional_ , been in the hustling game almost as long as he’s been alive.

It’s true that Judy doesn’t have that kind of experience. But she’s determined, and for all that he’s crafty, she’s crafty too.

“Tax evasion,” she says, smugly. She’s got him, dead to rights. Dead to his rights. It feels so good to be on the other end of this conversation, finally. “That’s up to five years in federal prison.”

His face fall, ears flattening to the sides of his head. The smugness he’s always radiating whooshes out of him like a gust of air. “You would do that, really? You’d send me to prison? Who’s going to look after Finnick if I’m gone?”

She hadn’t thought about that. She hadn’t thought about his son at all. She was so focused on herself, on Mrs. Otterton clutching her husband’s photo, eyes full of hurt.

“There’s foster care,” Judy says, not as confidant as she was a minute ago. She looks down at his son, at Finnick, snoring in his stroller. His fluffy cheek glistens with a strand of drool.

“Foster care—are you crazy?” Nick tries in vain to drag the stroller back the way he came. The boot makes an awful grinding sound every time he pulls. “Foster care? He’s a fox. What mammal is going to want to take him in?”

Judy’s mouth is dry. “Well it’s not like you’re providing the best environment for him. You’re dragging him all around the streets. You’re using him to run scams.”

Nick pulls down the top of the stroller. He snatches up Finnick, cradling him against his chest more gently than Judy thought was possible. He looks ready to run. Judy understands that instinct—it’s what drove her to be a police officer—that intense urge to protect those who can’t protect themselves. “To keep him fed. To provide for us. His mom up and split the second they snipped the umbilical. I’m not going to leave him too.”

Judy deflates, like the air left out of a parade balloon. Protect and serve—that’s her motto. She wants to protect and serve the missing mammals, but she has to protect and serve little Finnick too. Separating a family, even one as fragmented and smarmy as this, would be wrong. It wouldn’t be protecting or serving anyone but her own desire to prove herself.

“I’m…sorry,” she says. “I don’t know what came over me.”

“I do.” Nick’s eyes narrow. “You’re a meter maid overstepping her jurisdiction. Leave the missing persons cases to the professionals.”

“Look, I’ll erase it.” She holds up the pen, a peace offering, and lets the tape wind through. Then she hits the delete button. “It’s gone. Can you just tell me where you saw Otterton go?”

“Sure,” Nick says, “as soon as you let my stroller go.”

-

Her investigation never gets beyond a license plate she can’t access. She makes an official request with Clawhauser to have it run, but the department’s backlogged, and as soon as Bogo learns what it’s for, her request is dead in the water, and her career along with it.

Bogo is grinning at her resignation. His smile stretches across his face.

“You gave it a good effort, little bunny,” he says. “Just leave the police work to the real cops from now on.”

Judy walks out of the station feeling detached from her body. Her chest is heavy and her fur feels like there’s lead threaded through. It feels like the Judy Hopps she’s always been has stopped existing, and she’s left with someone scared and pathetic and new.

She trudges home. She foregoes the train commute, her idea of penance. The walk will give her time, time to reflect on what she could have done different, how she could have done better, all the things that there are left for her to do.

She gets a dozen blocks before she spots a familiar flash of orange fur. “Oh no,” she says to herself, and her teeth chatter like she’s cold. Her eyes film over and the pedestrians become a wash of colorful blurs.

She won’t cry. She won’t. She’s stronger than that, she has to be.

Nick spots her not long after. He swerves Finnick’s stroller to the left to avoid her.

“Miss Meter Maid,” he says with a mock salute. “Come to hassle me about pushing a stroller without a class C license?”

Judy’s breath hitches. Her chest floods warm. She can’t talk to him. She can’t even look at him, not if she’s going to keep it together. She can feel herself starting to unravel, a lot like the sweater she’d worn so many times the threads started poking through.

“No,” she whispers. It’s the most she can manage. She has to close her eyes then, and she drowns in the tears that well up underneath.

“Going soft on crime now?”

Judy still can’t bring herself to open her eyes. She draws a breath, holds it, and blows it out through her nose. “I’m no longer affiliated with the ZPD.”

Saying it out loud like that makes it easier, somehow. She opens her eyes and watches sunset paint the sky.

Nick grins. “I’m sorry to hear that,” he says, and Judy’s seen mimes act out contrition better than him.

Finnick reaches his arms up to her, asking to be held. Judy wants nothing more than to pick him up and cuddle, but instead she reaches out and takes his tiny paws in hers.

“Bye bye little guy,” she says, kissing each little paw in the center. They’re sticky, sweet with the smell of milk and juice. “It was nice to meet you.”

Nick spins slowly, so slowly, on his heel. “Look, we were heading to get dinner. If you want to join.”

Which is how she ends up in a corner diner, cutting vegetables to pieces with her fork and feeding Finnick sips of her dinner with her spoon. He burbles happily, reaching his arms out for more and more, mouth open like a baby bird. Nick uses a whole stack of napkins to clean tomato soup from his cheeks, and another dozen to try and clean up the mess drenching the front of his onesie.

“You were right, you know,” Judy says, tracing a scratch across the Formica tabletop. Nick’s focused on his own meal now, and Finnick is playing with scraps of food, squeezing them in his hands until they’re nothing but goo. “They were never going to take me seriously. I think I’m going to skip the living in squalor part and just go home.”  


Nick sighs like what he has to say hurts him. “You don’t have to live in squalor, Carrots. This is a big city, there’s plenty for you to do.”

She shakes her head. Her throat is tight and her spit is too heavy to swallow. “I’m a failure. I just thought that, if I worked hard enough, I could…..I don’t know.”

Nick rubs his hands together delightedly when the waitress sets a slice of blueberry pie in front of him. “Join the club,” he says, already three bites in. “You think any of us are where we really want to be? That’s life in the big city, darlin’.”

“All I’ve ever wanted to be was a police officer.”

“So want something new.”

Judy drops her face into her hands. “It’s not that easy.” She doesn’t know how she’s going to pay her next month’s rent—hell, she’s not even entirely sure how she’s going to pay for her five dollar check. She was counting on her first paycheck to hold her over. “I’m a disgraced police officer, I’m not exactly highly marketable in terms of future employment.”

“Look.” Nick isn’t looking at her. He’s focusing on mopping off his son, who is now smeared completely blue. Finnick grins, teeth white against the blueberry mush. “It might not be glamorous, but I could use some help with my pawpsicle business.”

“Your pawpsicle _hustle_ ,” she corrects.

“My pawpsicle entrepreneurship.” Nick glares. “It would save me a lot of trouble if I had someone who didn’t get chased out of half the ice cream parlors in the city. Plus, you can help with Fin. Try melting down a Jumbo-Pop when you’ve got a cranky baby with diaper rash. Now that’s a challenge worthy of ZPD’s finest.”

Judy doesn’t know what to say. She doesn’t know what she wants to say. Valedictorian to meter maid to pawpsicle hustler. How her life has changed in just the course of a few days. But what does she have to lose? Just the respect of her parents, her own sense of independence and self-worth. She can’t go home yet. She still has so much to prove.

“Okay,” she says. Can’t believe what she’s saying. That she’s agreeing to straddle the line between honest citizen and dubious criminal so suddenly. But Finnick’s smiling at her, blowing bubbles with his spit and laughing so hard when they pop that he almost chokes. And Nick’s just waiting with an expression like he cares what her answer is going to be. “Just until I can get back in the chief’s good graces.”

“Gotta have goals,” Nick says, and tips his drink to her.


End file.
